The Pharos Objective (40 page)

Hands on her hips, gasping for breath, Phoebe laughed, saw Caleb and waved. Alexander shouted and Caleb thought he heard the words “Old Rusty.”

“Dad,” Caleb scolded, “he got that from you. Loves that damn rust bucket. Every chance he gets he’s chucking stones at it, climbing through it, pretending to be Captain Nemo.”

Dropping his voice a notch, Caleb leaned in toward his parents’ stones. Carefully, keeping the words from the jealous wind, he whispered, “Alexander will be ready sooner than I thought.” Caleb looked through the trees, across the narrowest part of the bay, to their little white lighthouse glittering in the sun. “It’s waiting for him, down in our basement, beyond the root cellar door. Locked away behind what, I must say, are some ingenious puzzles of my own. Alexander will figure them out in time. But before that, I’ll teach him what he needs to know.”

Bowing his head, Caleb walked back to his sister and his son, back to the sunlight and the warmth. He paused at the rise and glanced back to the monuments.

“I promise, Alexander will make an excellent Keeper.”

EPILOGUE

The patient’s door opens with a sound like the hiss of an uncoiling python. The man outside wears a long overcoat, and a matching black hat all but covers the tangles of crimson hair matted in sweat beneath the fabric.

He takes off his gloves, slips them into a pocket. Before his next step, he glances over his shoulder at a heavyset man on the hallway floor, his neck broken. Outside, the Virginia sun has gone down for the day, and the quiet winds sweep across the sycamores, rolling over the Potomac—

—and three more bodies face-down in the water. Mercenaries, all of them, members of Waxman’s old crew, still guarding the last vestige of a program long-since officially cancelled, following orders from distant bureaucrats interested only in keeping certain secrets in the dark. It wasn’t a fair fight, but he has no interest in fairness.

Still hearing the echoes of the guard’s snapping vertebrae, he enters the room. Despite what he’s just done, he doesn’t like death, not the look of it, not the smell, not the way it sounds. Just being in its vicinity brings too many unwanted memories.

Too many visions that just won’t go away.

He turns his attention to the interior of the darkened chamber. The light from outside spills around him, seeking out the patient lying on the cot. IVs feed nutrients into her blood stream to keep her alive. How much longer could they keep her here? he wonders. Drugged up so she can’t remember, so her powers can’t surface? Forever? The men safeguarding this site on a skeleton crew, half-heartedly, had little idea of what or who she was.

A breath escapes her parched lips. Her head turns toward the light. Eyes flicker open.

Does she recognize me?

He thought she was an amnesiac, that her injuries beneath the Pharos stole her memories. But his visions—those he had started having back in Alexandria, before he deserted the Morpheus Initiative on the night of their ill-fated descent—showed him something else. Visions of the two of them together, glimpses even of this very moment, in this very room, doing what he is about to do.

He kneels beside her, takes her hand in his.

She blinks as her eyes focus. “You?”

Xavier Montross smiles, a twisted smile born of fiery visions and epic, exalted dreams. Relentless dreams, all his life showing him his purpose, what he was meant to find, what he was meant to be. So close now, almost within his grasp.

“Hello, Nina. Come, we have work to do.”

END OF BOOK ONE

For a preview of Book Two of the

Morpheus Initiative, read on . . .

And so begins the

The Mongol Objective

PROLOGUE

New Orleans
—
25 years ago

The pencil, wielded like a wooden stake gripped in his little fist, speeds over the page, creating details here, shading in areas there, stabbing at the heart of his horrific vision. And as the drawing takes form, emerging from the chrysalis of his young mind, sweat beads on the boy’s brow. He shakes his head to clear a thick lock of matted red hair from his eyes, awash in blue innocence the color of a robin’s egg, as they lose focus, crack, then tremble with inescapable dread.

The pencil point breaks, and he absently reaches into a box of sharpened pencils on the rug beside him. He ignores the sounds from the babysitter, the fifty-year-old neighbor with her fingers to her lips, watching over him in astonishment that slowly turns to horror as the lines on his page darken and the images assume clarity.

Finally, the boy sets down the pencil, blinks and looks up at the sitter with tears spilling from his eyes, cascading down his puffy red cheeks. He lifts the page, tears it from the pad and holds it up for her to see.

As she takes it, he whispers, “Help them?” but the sitter only bites the knuckles on the back of her hand. She crosses herself and steps away, dropping the page. The sheet of paper descends, pitching side to side like a leaf, before gently landing in front of the child.

He tries to look away, but can’t. He looks at it again, at the profile sketch of two people in an overturned car, a man clutching his chest, the woman next to him with her mouth open in a desperate scream as flames explode through the shattered windows, melt their flesh and char their bones.

Seconds drag into minutes. The sitter and the boy stare at each other, without a word.

The phone rings.

The boy slowly turns his head, and as the sitter goes to answer the call, he gets up, shuffles to the stairs and climbs. He struggles to ascend, every step a challenge. At the top, he enters his bedroom and closes the door before he can hear the cries from downstairs.

He sits on a small wooden chair in the middle of his room, and he desperately looks at the walls, trying to find just one bare inch, any small space that could serve as a refuge for his tortured soul, but the walls are completely covered. A haphazard assortment of pages, all rendered with his mad sketches, more than a hundred sheets of paper taped over the superhero wallpaper, attached crookedly, without a trace of aesthetic intent. Scribbled drawings from a dozen sketchpads, some pages clearly torn out in haste, overlap each other to form larger collages.

Each sheet reveals images no six-year-old should ever see, much less contemplate putting on paper. Drawings of men drowning, men burning, falling into deep pits crammed with long spikes, crushed under huge stones. Fires incinerating entire rooms. Acid chewing away at flesh. Severed limbs floating under water, heads bobbing along the surface. Amidst all this grotesque butchery, almost as background stage art, he’s drawn enormous structures: colossal pyramids, crumbling ancient temples, a huge statue, an underground city. And in several frames, an enormous tower with a blazing light at its peak lords over a turbulent harbor.
On each of these pages, it’s as if the wondrous architectural structures are merely a backdrop for death and dismemberment, scenes of extreme, punishing violence.

The boy blinks and his eyes lose focus again. He reaches down and picks up a sketchpad and a pencil lying on the floor and starts drawing, even as slow, heavy footsteps approach up the stairs. He keeps drawing, sketching, shading, using light and shadow, creating a crude rendition of what looks like the top half of an enormous head, crowned with spikes, peeking out from a landscape of either sand or possibly ice. Tiny human forms are gathered around it, using shovels and pulleys.

And then the door creaks open.

“Honey . . . I have to tell you something. There’s been an accident. Your father and mother were on their way home, and—”

The boy lowers his head, and his eyes focus momentarily, filling with uncontrolled emotion. Then he blinks the swelling tears away. He looks up to the window, the pale light suffusing around his pupils, and again the room loses focus as if he’s staring at something a long, long way off.

“Xavier? Did you hear me?”

He directs his attention again at his latest drawing, then glances at the wall in front of him, concentrating on one sheet in particular, puzzled as to why this one should pull at his attention. Next to the muted image of a huge seal there’s another drawing finished in colored crayons. It depicts a woman strapped to a bed, with two men crumpled on the ground around her, crimson splatters on their chests. A third man—a man with red hair—approaches.

“Xavier?”

The boy blinks again.

“Xavier honey, did you hear what I said?”

He turns his head and manages a smile. “Yes, but I’m sorry, I still have work to do.”

Turning away from her, Xavier Montross picks up his pencil and flips to a blank page.

Author’s Notes on the factual basis for

The Pharos Objective.

1)         The central element of this novel is based on fact. Legend holds that King Michael III spread a rumor that Alexander the Great’s treasure was hidden inside the Pharos Lighthouse, hoping the Muslims would destroy the lighthouse in their greed. Another Arab legend recounts that a hundred horsemen then stormed into the lighthouse to plunder its secrets, only to spring some sort of trap that swept them all out to sea.

2)         The description of the Pharos Lighthouse, its size and the many marvelous elements inside, such as the automaton statues and the great mirror, come mainly from Hermann Thierschs’ 1909 work,
The Pharos Lighthouse
, which he researched from a host of early Roman and Arab sources. The architect, Sostratus, cleverly signed his name upon this monument as described here.

3)         There is an historic landmark lighthouse at Sodus Bay in Upstate New York. It was completed in 1871 and served as the residence for its keepers for the next eighty years. It’s now run as a maritime museum, chock full of history. I, of course, took certain liberties with the layout and its current fictional use.

4)         A project incorporating parapsychology and archaeology took place in Alexandria in 1979. It was led by the
Mobius Group
, which utilized remote viewing to locate Cleopatra’s palace and Alexander’s tomb, among other lost sites. The fascinating story can be read in Stephen A. Schwartz’s
The Alexandria Project
.

5)         The eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD that buried Pompeii and Herculaneum ironically kept intact one of the largest collection of ancient scrolls—those owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar. Brigham Young University has been working with the Biblioteca Nazionale in Naples since 1999, applying NASA-developed imaging techniques to read the scrolls. The involvement of Count Cagliostro and his connection to the real 14
^th-
century Rimini Church of San Francesco are my own creation.

6)         The three theories on the destruction of the Great Library at Alexandria are the prevailing, most logical conclusions, although there have been ardent proponents of one over the other. Modern consensus is as I have presented here.

7)         The CIA led many investigations into parapsychology, hoping to gain an edge in national defense during the Cold War, and these programs have now been declassified. The Stargate Program was the best known, operating for twenty-four years, using the skills of early RV founders like Ingo Swann. Its proponents claim many successes, including viewing the location of downed pilots, predicting the rings of Jupiter before Voyager confirmed them, and scrying Russian nuclear facilities. Other information on remote viewing, including classes and lectures, can be obtained from the PsiTech organization at:
www.remoteviewing.com
and from Ingo Swann’s website:
www.biomindsuperpowers.com/Pages/1.html
.

8)        The Emerald Tablet is part of a collection attributed to the Egyptian god Thoth (Greek Hermes, Roman Mercury). A selection of these writings that survived were assembled in the Middle Ages and compiled into
The Hermetic Arcanum
. These and other books were largely deemed heretical and banned, but formed the basis for the elements of alchemy and the foundation of many secret societies such as the Freemasons and the Rosicrucians. There are many great resources concerning the study of alchemy, including
The Emerald Tablet
by Dennis William Hauck (Penguin, 1999).